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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22673248">≤</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/N313/pseuds/N313'>N313</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Metal Gear</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, snake pov character study thing from 2018</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 17:42:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>924</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22673248</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/N313/pseuds/N313</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>genuflecting in the absence of a man</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gray Fox/Solid Snake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>≤</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>would you have done it the way that i did?</p><p>his head broke in my hands and i wish that you could break mine in the same way. some sense of poetic justice, or vengeance, or disgust</p><p>who decides a side and who are you?</p><p>i don’t know.</p><p>i’m too exhausted but i’m full of something and it’s overflowing from me, vomiting out into whatever this is and whatever my mind has become, leaking through the cracks</p><p>congeal or freeze or do anything i just don’t want you to fall out of the loose lips that are the wrinkles of my brain, this infinite prison that will not keep anything in</p><p>if we only use a small percentage of our brains then it just means the rest can spill out onto the concrete around us. it’s just sloshing around uselessly anyhow, and sometimes i wish that all that’s left could just leave. if my amygdala could just claw its way out of my eye. i wouldn’t be able to process the fact that i</p><p>i’m tired i don’t know what i’m talking about. but i never do. i never need to. i have. something</p><p>listen to me.</p><p>if you had been N313 and i had been N312 things would have been okay. you wouldn’t respond like this. you wouldn’t think like this. you wouldn’t be unable to think. you wouldn’t be trapped in this never ending cycle of nothing in nowhere and you wouldn’t be no one. you would still be you</p><p>you wouldn’t have lost control. his skull wouldn’t be broken eggshells scattered halfway to galzburg with the rest of the shrapnel. where would you be right now?</p><p>where are you?</p><p>the difference between a man and a soldier is a three letter word.<br/>
the difference between a soldier and a corpse is a three letter word.<br/>
the difference between a man and a corpse is a bullet.<br/>
the difference between a corpse and a ghost is a three letter word.</p><p>i’m not like you.</p><p>i’m a hound without its master and my neck is worn raw from running circles around this goddamned post but the man who tells me what to do is never, ever coming back.</p><p>he haunts my dreams and my waking thoughts but in my head he’s not a man anymore and i can assure you that i damn well deserve to be haunted for what i’ve done.</p><p>i don’t think that there’s a such thing as a good person, but i’m further from the theoretical than you are, if only for the fact that you’re not a coward. even if you’ve been afraid before, if you’ve felt that urge, you’re not like me, because you would never go through with it.</p><p>i’m not a reptile anymore. you’ll always be a mammal.</p><p>even if you shook the need, you would still be a mammal. you would still be adjacent to what you once were. but you don’t change that way, and even if you do, you don’t to me.</p><p>i wish that you could just tell me what i’m doing wrong, but maybe even more than that, i wish that i could stop wanting your approval.</p><p>i don’t deserve it. i don’t deserve to think about you like this. i don’t deserve to have known you. you’re leagues above and i’m just. here.</p><p>i’m genuflecting in the absence of a man that i may have killed through my own inaction. i can’t say that i was just following orders. that doesn’t fucking mean anything when the man giving me the orders in the first place was the conductor of the entire goddamned orchestra and the crescendo of the piece drove a hot brand directly into my head and it is still burning inside of me</p><p>you feel it too, don’t you?</p><p>after all, you just exist intangibly inside of my head, nothing more than a memory. you’re a fragment of something that never could have been real. something that i could never have. and that’s okay. i’m not meant to have it.</p><p>but without you i don’t have a frame of reference and i don’t know what i am now.</p><p>i killed him because i was scared. regardless of whether you feel he deserved death for what he’d done, i shouldn’t have been the one to deliver. i didn’t deserve it. it should have been you.</p><p>if you really are dead, then i wish that things had been reversed.</p><p>even that’s selfish of me, though, isn’t it? i’m sitting here lamenting the fact that i have to deal with this, but for all i know, maybe you would regret it, too. maybe you have more regrets than i do, maybe more than i could possibly fathom, and maybe this would have sent that perfectly balanced tower of your composure toppling down. if i’m being realistic, mine was precarious already, and it’s not saying much for it to have happened to me, but</p><p>you knew him, right? like, really knew him. it seemed like it.</p><p>i wish that i had gotten to know you. i don’t know why i can’t stop thinking about you now.</p><p>if i could just know you, then maybe i could understand you, and</p><p>no. i don’t think i ever could. even if i had all the time in the world, i don’t know that i could ever truly get inside your head and understand how it connects to itself, how you connected to him, how you connect to me.</p><p>but i would want to try.</p>
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